However, if they claimed they feel instant pain the minute the transmitter kicks on, they're probably lying.
LYING? See... ignorance like yours is the reason people don't want to believe that their illness is psychosomatic. A psychological/physical feedback loop can be just as life-threatening as pure physical damage. Which is why if you or anyone has a coworker who THINKS your technology is hurting him -- you should DEFINITELY move it, if you value his or her well-being at all.
The reason is that Absolute Zero is a concept that doesn't really exist in nature. Nor does, for all practical purposes, much of the range 'below zero'. Furthermore, to speak of temperature in terms of 'magnitude' and to speak of Absolute Zero (0K) as the default no-magnitude state, is to posit that we all live in a vaccuum.
The default no-magnitude state is not absolute zero -- a condition that doesn't really exist. To base an appraisal of the 'magnitude' of an effect on a nonexistent default is to totally mess up the common understanding of the terms, and the destroy the point of even considering what is 'an order of magnitude larger' in its worldly effects. (Again, I stress to you, a world in which the effect 'absolute zero' is not possible.)
Therefore, the only real-world meaning that the idea of 'orders of magnitude' can have with regard to a temperature rating is in relation to an arbitrary baseline chosen for convenience. Zero degrees Celsius is a pretty good choice, as it's a temperature low enough that a computer will probably never see it, and that is sufficient, because all magnitudes below this level are completely irrelevant.
But as the freezing point of water has no specifically relevant relationship to the performance of nanotechnology, room temperature is a far better choice, representing the 'default heat radiation' in the environment throughout which computers are deployed.
So a computer that can run at 320C is an order of magnitude better than one that can only run at 50C (30C above room) -- this should be considered accurate. And since this is the ONLY definition of orders of magnitude that makes ANY real world sense in relation to computer temperature performance, to define magnitude in relation to anything else is just an example of the over-exercise of pedantry rendering a term impossible to use meaningfully -- so a computer that can run at the boiling point of water is only about 37% better in its tolerances than a computer that can't even run above the freezing point?
Reductio ad absurdum. QED.
Why does EVERY successful tech company suddenly want to be your OS? Christ, even Facebook now wants to be your OS. I ALREADY HAVE AN OS IN FACT WE ALREADY HAVE HUNDREDS OF OSES SO STOP TRYING TO REINVENT THE WHEEL. I look forward to the day when the computer operating system is something nobody thinks about anymore, and instead thinks more about new operations to add to this system.
We have an industry full of people falling all over each other to reinnovate the first thing that was ever innovated in this space, because they are all telling stories to each other that lionise those who take over the whole product. These are the typical developer's heroes: people who forced an advantage in one application into a measure of control over the system. Their heroes are not the people who just design one application that is incredibly good at some goal, and then continue to focus themselves on that goal -- these sorts of people are just not 'thinking outside the box'. And 'thinking outside the box' usually means making the "intellectual" leap to you sitting on top of the box, owning the whole box -- i.e. the only thing you will allow outside the box you are building, is you. Thinking in this way about every possible product is thought in this particular society to make one brilliant, maybe even a genius.
For some reason, this type of thought process is no longer called by its former name: 'ragingly narcissistic megalomania'. No, now it proves you are brilliant and insightful, rather than just nakedly ambitious to the point that you see a crown for yourself (and little else) in everything.
Watching something REALLY stupid happen like the best social networking app that has ever lived trying to remake itself into the shittiest "operating system" that has ever lived, proves that the tech industry's self-image is fundamentally broken, and we need entirely new models for what is a 'smart' engineer, what is a 'good' design philosophy, and what is a tech 'hero'. Because we can't continue to thrive with a million little Bill Gateses like this; that ship has sailed, my friends. And it's not even a very intereesting ship.
In the future people will get about as excited about new OSes as they do about new plumbing networks. Trust me, people, in the long view the application is the heart of our world, not the OS. The OS is a necessary evil: if you could get rid of it, you would. This is rarely true of the application. Therefore, ultimately, applications will be removed from operating systems to stand out on their own (the opposite of the current trend, and what would naturally REALLY happen if there weren't current technical advantages to functional integration that are very specific to today's tech level).
Most filmmaker's don't make movies in the hopes of winning a role in the design of film projectors -- because the two arts are entirely unrelated, so it would be a stupid, broken way for an industry to self-motivate. And yet this is exactly how the tech industry does it.
Even my social networking designers, who are faced with the task of writing an app to manage the most complex network we know (human society), seem to think of themselves primarily as faced with the task of winning a seat managing one of the most simplistic network designs we know (binary logic machines). It begs reason!
In fact, the whole thing is so stupid in a decidedly 'Hitchhiker's Galaxy' way, that I call for the immediate destruction of the tech industry as a whole, followed by the more logical apportionment of the design of tools in each field to experts in that field: so that social networking sites will be designed by wannabe sociologists, instead of by wannabe driver writers.
Sure, I suppose that could be better. Even better, I would want the option to direct people wherever I wish from a link to my profile that is rejected due not being within my circles of privacy. I should be able to redirect them to the specific public profile link, or to 404 them if I wish (because you know, some people choose not to give out their public profile link).
Because the 'wrong link' has a legitimate purpose -- to direct somebody who is already in your network (i.e. lives in your city, goes to your school) and already on Facebook to your FULL profile, not your publically neutered one.
Looking at all the comments it's pretty obvious that slashdotters just don't get Facebook. It's not a substitute for real life -- it IS real life. You don't do it instead of going out and meeting people, you go out and meet people *because* you did it. All of the whole canards about wasting time online do not apply to Facebook, anymore than talking to your friends on the phone or text messaging them, resulting in plans being made and gossip exchanged, etc., is an avoidance of real life. In fact, I was avoiding my real life *before* Facebook. Being on Facebook made my hermitude impossible.
There are possible things to criticise with Facebook, but the oldtimers are choosing all the wrong targets. Really, who cares about friends list competitions? Keeping up with the Joneses is also a facet of real life -- so either tune out and drop out, or opt in and deal with the real, but make up your mind! and the real can be very shallow, if you think about wrong, that's one of its defining attributes -- a few months dissing the new online generation for being shallow, and how quickly we forget that all Tom and Bill talk about is their souped up motor vehicles and snowmobiles, and that's all theyre ever going to talk about no matter where you meet them, and superficial people will be superficial in any context.
Facebook isn't going to turn your friends into the most sophisticated and charming group of people on the planet. It just puts you in touch with who they are, how they are -- always. Any criticism that involves normal human foibles in the exercise of materialism is a criticism of any multiparty communication system, not just Facebook.
Get used to it, oldtimers, and stop underestimating, or you'll turn your heads and suddenly the world will be converted into something you thought you could safely discount as a joke.
Not that the world will log onto Facebook, specifically. But the world online will inevitably become more and more like Facebook, because the big secret that is out among the youth now is that Tim Berners-Lee got it backwards. The most important people that you want to maintain a 'web presence' for *isn't* composed of a random collection of bloggers, academics, kooks, and general internet strangers waiting to snipe at you anonymously. The people you want to maintain a presence for are primarily your friends.
No, people who dis Facebook as an avoidance of real life, when it's the first website in history that actually aims to bring your real life to the web, are getting it spectacularly, head-slappingly wrong.
I hate to break it to you, but there have been people who have been able to get away with exactly the sort of academic strategy you describe since long before we had 'concentration' pills, so this 'unfair advantage' is nothing new. All students are not nor have they ever been created equal. Some people just learn some subjects way easier than other people do. If somebody is trying to pop some pill in order to get ahead, they are likely paying for that in some other way, so it changes exactly nothing about the balance of the world.
Would be to specify the patents you want to defeat. Why build a system an order of magnitude bigger than what it needs to be? If there are problem patents on the record, target those. Sure, it's a big job, but it ain't shit compared to tracking all ideas, everywhere, for all time, to solve a problem with a very specific set of ideas that have legal claims attached to them.
After you have identified the enemy, find publications (foreign and otherwise, they all fit the requirements) that contain a prior description of a similar idea. (The one-click buy? For stuff like that, it should be easy.) And then start a public campaign for emailing and/or snailing copies of these descriptions en masse to the Patent Office. (Forget petitions. If you aren't inconveniencing anyone, don't even bother.)
I mean, just look at the two different stories that Reiser's son told regarding the last argument between his mother and father: He had to have been making false statements in one of the two interviews, since they contain mutually contradictory statements of fact. No they don't. I don't know why nobody else seems to have noticed this (including Joshua Davis himself), but 'Version 00' and 'Version 01' of Rory's story, as presented by Davis, are not really incompatible on the substance. '00' is about the first time Rory cames upstairs. '01' is about second time. Therefore, they are not in conflict. And the only way they could be said to be in conflict is the omission of the second encounter from one of the two versions. Rory is 6 years old. I think he can definitely be forgiven such an omission, without his testimony being considered as 'contradictory'.
The rest of the complaints aside it may have very well been appropriate not to count Teredo as a vulnerability. Here's why: assume that windows was technologically backwards and couln't get on the internet. Would you then agree that Linux was less secure, because the possibility exists to hack it over the internet while that possibility does not exist for windows? That's impressive the way you managed to completely factor any actual real world risk to the end user out of the concept of 'security'. I guess, by your logic, if Microsoft added a 'feature' to let anyone on the internet 'collaborate' with you by modifying any file on your hard drive they wish, we could not call them any less secure than LINUX, because LINUX doesn't have this feature.
Never mind that every single Windows user just lost all their files. That doesn't fit your definition of 'comparatively insecure'.
Perhaps your sig should read 'Sophistry! Sophistry!...'
Why do Americans call the boy king "King Tut"? His full name was Tutankhamun (or Tutankhamen)! Is this name so hard to spell or pronounce? Tut makes him sound like some fifth rate Batman villain! Grrrrrr! I'm afraid I must object to your use of this one-syllable colloquialism, 'Grrrrrr!' Would it have been so difficult to type 'This makes me very angry,' in proper English?
Not really the point. Like I said, having the passenger in the car is almost certainly more dangerous than not having the passenger in the car. Yet we allow passengers in cars. Something being statistically more dangerous does not necessarily mean it should be outlawed. After all if you add enough people to an activity eventually a bunch of them are going to die from it. With a small population it might take 50 years for this to happen. With a large population it might happen several times a year. Aggregate enough data about eating apples and you will find that it kills.
This is why yearly death figures are completely meaningless. Death figures are only useful when expressed as a percentage of participants, and that's the only way we should consider them, to avoid the absurd effect that the bigger our population is, the fewer rights anybody has to do anything fun, because of a statistical illusion. I think a society of a billion people deserves the same rights and freedoms as a society of 1000 people. Which means we MUST learn to tolerate multiple people per year dying from the sort of activity that only kills 1 person a decade in a smaller country. We MUST learn to see the two as MORALLY EQUIVALENT -- because they are.
The person in the passenger seat can see out of the windows. They often know when to shut up, and you don't usually have to explain why you're not talking right now either. There is a social pressure with a phone call not to ignore someone. I have been with plenty of passengers who don't know when to shut up -- most of them, in fact. But the 'shut up now' periods that happen while driving are exceedingly brief, like when merging into traffic -- and, of course, the slower the merge, the less the need to shut up, anyway. I have never had a problem with being able to shut up for a few seconds on a cel, and never had to explain it, either. I just say, 'hang on...' less than 10 seconds later, I'm back. There is no social pressure not to do things like this, that sounds like nonsense to me.
Just another example of why everything cool in our society is being pounding into pap by overprotective nerds. For example, when I was a kid there were awesome playgrounds with giant slides, great swinging tires, fireman poles, et cetera. Not anymore. You know, technically, if you keep everything in a 10 foot cube for their entire lives with intravenous feeding, there would be a lot fewer unnecessary deaths. You want to be the first?
There is a line here where responsible concern crosses into anal retention. Asking people to devote their hands and eyes exclusively to their driving doesn't cross it. Asking people not to have a conversation most certainly does, as does passing laws such as roller bladers MUST wear helmets et cetera, ad nauseum. Isn't anyone concerned about where this road ends? Pretty soon they're going to outlaw smoking outdoors in my country. They're already talking about it. The big brother society is already here.
Okay, what's the difference between talking on a handsfree cel and talking to the person in the passenger seat? Or do you think that drivers should wear muzzles? Or here's an idea -- outlaw passengers. Drivers without passengers would inevitably cause fewer accidents. My point: life is a risk that you must take in order live it. Reasonable responsibility like not busying your hands on other things while driving are common sense. Demanding that people not busy their mouths either is just getting incredibly anal about it and setting the bar for cel phones inexplicably higher than any other form of driving conversation.
- Two more days to determine this for certain, but it appears that if only the iPod/syncing functionality (or first time setup, anyway) is what is tied with iTunes activation, WiFi via the browser will probably work fine as-is without a contract. Note: it is not certain that this is the case, but it seems likely. (Just a point of information; not stating this as inconrtovertible fact. The only way this might not be the case is if the entire phone is just locked until activated, which seems unlikely.) *Only*? Why?! Because it's technically impossible to prevent someone from connecting to the internet unless you prevent them from accessing the machine at all? Where do you get this belief?
Apple/AT&T *could* lock the entire phone until activated, or they could just lock Safari. Or, they could just lock the wifi stack itself. Or, they could just lock the preferences with which you would need to set up your wifi behaviour. Or, they could just lock you out of any and all access points. Or, they could do just about a hundred other things since they have the run of the device and can lock as much of it or as little of it as they want.
So... no. This isn't the only way this might happen, rendering your speculation that they will be forced by this nonexistent engineering hurdle to let you use wifi without activation, inoperative.
In other words... keep on dreamin'...
A cogent response. It is a good point that lab rats aren't the same as humans, but notice that this doesn't prevent correlated effects from happening, nor does it prevent our scientists from gleaning valuable information from these correlations. In other words: scientists do experiment on lab rats! So clearly a non-identical testbed is no barrier to science -- never has been.
Your point also in the first paragraph about time scales is less good. If we are so hard-pressed to keep our climate now with 6 billion-odd people, it goes without saying that 100 years from now we will be even more pressed. Or do you think that either (a) we will all be dead in a few hundred years or (b) we will have solved all our climate problems and will no longer be busy destablising our climate in countless ways both old and new. These extremes are the only logical conditions in which your 'time scales' rebuttal operates, because *all* of the in-between scenarios involve continuing homegrown climate challenges for us on an ongoing basis. Thus, 'it will take too long' is an irrelevant evaluation. Personally, I think the future is overwhelmingly likely to work out into one of those in-between scenarios. We ain't even close to done to nearly killing ourselves yet, but I doubt that we will be *completely* successful at it even if the worst disasters happen. Some of us will survive, probably with scientific knowledge. What do we do for next time, the next 'civilisation' -- just hope and pray that human nature will have changed? Give up now? I find your view to be pessimistic to the point of nihilism.
Finally, you're right: it is naive to suggest that we can accurately forecast the effects of our actions. That is why we need to go in there and start taking actions and observing the resuls -- that is how you build an accurate forecast system. As for preserving Mars like a some kind of deserted 'National Park' -- sorry but I find this idea a bit laughable on several levels. There isn't even any life that will benefit from this range -- we're talking about rocks here. Do we have any designated 'National Parks' on Earth where there is no actual wilderness (i.e. noting alive and "wild")? Have we designated a particularly interestingly shaped Iceberg in Antarctica a national park?
Mars is not a "wilderness".
The only thing that I can think of that would be of value to anyone on Mars is the geological record of its history, along with any artefacts that could provide evidence that there may have been life on it at one time. There is no reason that terraforming needs to interfere with that kind of science. We aren't going to be taking a blender to the planet or anything. Terraforming is just changing the atmosphere and the soil content (and the soil content part only really has to apply to a small patch of the planet -- face it, we aren't going to be emigrating in the millions to Mars or anything, this is going to be a small colony for the entire course of the experiment). We could easily leave more than 90% of the planet in its original state, aside from the presence of an atmosphere. In fact, it would probably be prohibitively complex to conduct any experiment on a larger scale than that.
The side benefits is that the geologists can go up with the terraformers and conduct the two surveys in tandem. These dudes are dying to go up there and actually dig for historical knowledge (rather than survival knowledge). Nobody's going to pay their freight for the sake of history -- but as passengers on a mission of vital importance to the future? This could happen.
A mission to terraform is probably one of the best things that could happen to science and the human race.
You've got this completely backwards. We *should* be monkeying around with the *uninhabited* planet, not the inhabited one. (Unless you are suggesting that you think there might be life there *currently* -- pretty much the only thing that is almost universally agreed about Mars is that there isn't.) And even if we can't stop monkeying with the one we live on. Although it's probably doomed to fail, that's not the point. Even attempting to terraform Mars could teach us things (in a nonlethal environment since nobody lives there yet, thus there is nobody to "inflict" anything on) about our own planet that will end up saving all life of Earth.
We need to start learning how to accurately terraform -- this much is obvious. The fact that any Mars ecosystem would likely be unsustainable due to lack of a magnetosphere and low gravity, etc. actually makes it a perfect place to start -- because we actually have no clue what we're doing in this area. We need to make our mistakes on a 'temporary' habitat -- if Mars will lose whatever we do to its 'atmosphere' and revert to its barren state over some hundreds or thousands of years, all the better -- it's an automatic reset switch. It means the system tends to return to its origin. That's perfect: we can try again later in a slightly or completely different manner.
So, no... you *don't* keep your hands off the scientifically perfect "test range planet" out of some misplaced sense of an ethical responsibility that is actually meaningless (responsibility to whom? the memory of native Martians who might have been?)
No, you use the test planet to learn about planet-wide effects in a casualty-free manner. Your argument is like saying to a scientist, 'I'm not really sure I want you to be inflicting your test vaccines on these innocent lab rats. At least not until we figure out how to fix the way it works in humans.'
If you want an actual *solution* to unwanted global climate change (other than: adapt!), we are going to have to start screwing around and experimenting with global climates. Seems to me like a no-brainer.
Terraform Mars. Planetwide intractable problems and all. Even if it turns out to be livable for only 25 years, the lessons learned will have been well worth the money and effort, and could end up saving not only the human race but every species on Earth.
There is really not much creative use to which you can put a bottle of ketchup (that would be fit for a G-rated audience), is there? Garbage In / Garbage Out. Oh, and one more tip for Heinz: if you are going to try to "harness" the power of audience enthusiasm, it helps not slag off the unprofessionalism of all your entries in public. Guess what just happened to all of the enthusiasm of everybody who read that insult? If you're going to truck with the mob, you have to find a way to appreciate the mob. And don't give them a lame-o assignment to start with.
Well my comment is certainly about the steady unmitigated march of DRM in America, so it is certainly on-topic. Last I checked the definition of a troll was not 'anyone with an opinion about a problem who doesn't contribute to the solution'. Exceedingly narrow, that one.
And yeah, I absolutely do revel in the impending collapse of your cultural *hegemony* (note I didn't say the collapse of your actual culture) -- perhaps you don't realise just how oppressive that hegemony can be? It's very difficult to get the attention of your own countrymen when they have been advertised into oblivion by the American entertainment machine. The Great Suicide of DRM works in everybody else's favour on two fronts: it associates American entertainment with draconian restrictions, which is a serious image problem; and it actually hampers and chills the free exchange of ideas when one of those ideas originates in your litigious land -- heck it even chills the free exchange when BOTH ideas originate in the USA. Attenuation of the evolutonary field: it will inevitably take its toll. And the great part of it is, America is doing it to itself as a result of exactly the same materialism that empties its main cultural exports of any consequence.
Poetic justice, well deserved. Definitely worth a few chuckles and cheers, and a party. Questions: Do Buddhists believe in a sense of humour? What about irony? Any zen in that?
This has been a long time coming.
I would only buy that if in every choice of two, the people always choose the lesser idiot. But this is almost never the case. They almost always choose the bigger idiot. Therefore, as long as big idiots decide to run, it doesn't matter who else runs: the people will still fuck themselves.
To sum up the parent post: terrorists and other recent immigrants, wannabe actors, and internet users who aren't even morally righteous enough to at least live in the US, are stealing the precious financial fluids of the American people, and the solution is to replace all the pin numbers that these fine upstanding Americans have stored in their heads with a verification device that is stored in their pockets, so that it... won't be so easy to... sorry, can't type -- laughing...
You may disagree with my opinion, but I assure you that I am dead serious about it. Is everybody who doesn't like your culture a troll? If you must know I find it for the most part empty and insanely materialistic, and I would be surprised if you don't feel exactly the same way. BTW the periodic reinvention *is* a good thing, but it's obviously taking a turn for the worse, because your entertainment industry is now reinventing itself as the Death Star.
And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering?
Actually, by that measure, these 6-bit LCDs might get a pass, since they dither through time not space. In other words, a single individual pixel can be responsible for both colours involved in the dither (by just flashing rapidly through two states). Thus that individual IS displaying a colour not strictly contained in the 6-bit colour space.
I would say this is a grey area. But I do think the advertising on these LCDs led people to mistakenly equate this "flashing 18-bit pixel" with a "static 24-bit pixel", so I am in support of the lawsuit but only if it is widened to encompass the entire laptop industry. Bullshit advertising is, actually, bullshit. Who can say otherwise? Let there be consequences.
The parent post should definitely NOT be scored as informative. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between colour as it is displayed on a computer monitor and colour as it is stored in the host file. Unless Adobe and others just spontaneously decided to cripple their file formats, all of the things mentioned above about the impact of LCD characteristics on the manipulability of digital photos are complete nonsense.
I can't stop laughing and cheering as I continue to watch American culture self-implode under the weight of its own arrogance and greed. Almost every decade, American has reinvented itself in a major way (the '70s, the '80s, and the '90s all had their own movements that cut across film, music, television, and even the slower-moving world of books). This decade I've been waiting for the 'Big New American Thing' and here it is, it's DRM. Watching the slow suffocation that comes from not realising that you owe your audience everything and they actually owe you nothing. I want this. I celebrate it. I've been hoping it accelerates and my hopes just always seem to be one-upped by reality. Sayonara people! The era of American cultural hegemony is coming to a close, and I'm havin' a party!
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However, if they claimed they feel instant pain the minute the transmitter kicks on, they're probably lying. LYING? See ... ignorance like yours is the reason people don't want to believe that their illness is psychosomatic. A psychological/physical feedback loop can be just as life-threatening as pure physical damage. Which is why if you or anyone has a coworker who THINKS your technology is hurting him -- you should DEFINITELY move it, if you value his or her well-being at all.
The reason is that Absolute Zero is a concept that doesn't really exist in nature. Nor does, for all practical purposes, much of the range 'below zero'. Furthermore, to speak of temperature in terms of 'magnitude' and to speak of Absolute Zero (0K) as the default no-magnitude state, is to posit that we all live in a vaccuum. The default no-magnitude state is not absolute zero -- a condition that doesn't really exist. To base an appraisal of the 'magnitude' of an effect on a nonexistent default is to totally mess up the common understanding of the terms, and the destroy the point of even considering what is 'an order of magnitude larger' in its worldly effects. (Again, I stress to you, a world in which the effect 'absolute zero' is not possible.) Therefore, the only real-world meaning that the idea of 'orders of magnitude' can have with regard to a temperature rating is in relation to an arbitrary baseline chosen for convenience. Zero degrees Celsius is a pretty good choice, as it's a temperature low enough that a computer will probably never see it, and that is sufficient, because all magnitudes below this level are completely irrelevant. But as the freezing point of water has no specifically relevant relationship to the performance of nanotechnology, room temperature is a far better choice, representing the 'default heat radiation' in the environment throughout which computers are deployed. So a computer that can run at 320C is an order of magnitude better than one that can only run at 50C (30C above room) -- this should be considered accurate. And since this is the ONLY definition of orders of magnitude that makes ANY real world sense in relation to computer temperature performance, to define magnitude in relation to anything else is just an example of the over-exercise of pedantry rendering a term impossible to use meaningfully -- so a computer that can run at the boiling point of water is only about 37% better in its tolerances than a computer that can't even run above the freezing point? Reductio ad absurdum. QED.
Why does EVERY successful tech company suddenly want to be your OS? Christ, even Facebook now wants to be your OS. I ALREADY HAVE AN OS IN FACT WE ALREADY HAVE HUNDREDS OF OSES SO STOP TRYING TO REINVENT THE WHEEL. I look forward to the day when the computer operating system is something nobody thinks about anymore, and instead thinks more about new operations to add to this system. We have an industry full of people falling all over each other to reinnovate the first thing that was ever innovated in this space, because they are all telling stories to each other that lionise those who take over the whole product. These are the typical developer's heroes: people who forced an advantage in one application into a measure of control over the system. Their heroes are not the people who just design one application that is incredibly good at some goal, and then continue to focus themselves on that goal -- these sorts of people are just not 'thinking outside the box'. And 'thinking outside the box' usually means making the "intellectual" leap to you sitting on top of the box, owning the whole box -- i.e. the only thing you will allow outside the box you are building, is you. Thinking in this way about every possible product is thought in this particular society to make one brilliant, maybe even a genius. For some reason, this type of thought process is no longer called by its former name: 'ragingly narcissistic megalomania'. No, now it proves you are brilliant and insightful, rather than just nakedly ambitious to the point that you see a crown for yourself (and little else) in everything. Watching something REALLY stupid happen like the best social networking app that has ever lived trying to remake itself into the shittiest "operating system" that has ever lived, proves that the tech industry's self-image is fundamentally broken, and we need entirely new models for what is a 'smart' engineer, what is a 'good' design philosophy, and what is a tech 'hero'. Because we can't continue to thrive with a million little Bill Gateses like this; that ship has sailed, my friends. And it's not even a very intereesting ship. In the future people will get about as excited about new OSes as they do about new plumbing networks. Trust me, people, in the long view the application is the heart of our world, not the OS. The OS is a necessary evil: if you could get rid of it, you would. This is rarely true of the application. Therefore, ultimately, applications will be removed from operating systems to stand out on their own (the opposite of the current trend, and what would naturally REALLY happen if there weren't current technical advantages to functional integration that are very specific to today's tech level). Most filmmaker's don't make movies in the hopes of winning a role in the design of film projectors -- because the two arts are entirely unrelated, so it would be a stupid, broken way for an industry to self-motivate. And yet this is exactly how the tech industry does it. Even my social networking designers, who are faced with the task of writing an app to manage the most complex network we know (human society), seem to think of themselves primarily as faced with the task of winning a seat managing one of the most simplistic network designs we know (binary logic machines). It begs reason! In fact, the whole thing is so stupid in a decidedly 'Hitchhiker's Galaxy' way, that I call for the immediate destruction of the tech industry as a whole, followed by the more logical apportionment of the design of tools in each field to experts in that field: so that social networking sites will be designed by wannabe sociologists, instead of by wannabe driver writers.
Sure, I suppose that could be better. Even better, I would want the option to direct people wherever I wish from a link to my profile that is rejected due not being within my circles of privacy. I should be able to redirect them to the specific public profile link, or to 404 them if I wish (because you know, some people choose not to give out their public profile link).
Because the 'wrong link' has a legitimate purpose -- to direct somebody who is already in your network (i.e. lives in your city, goes to your school) and already on Facebook to your FULL profile, not your publically neutered one. Looking at all the comments it's pretty obvious that slashdotters just don't get Facebook. It's not a substitute for real life -- it IS real life. You don't do it instead of going out and meeting people, you go out and meet people *because* you did it. All of the whole canards about wasting time online do not apply to Facebook, anymore than talking to your friends on the phone or text messaging them, resulting in plans being made and gossip exchanged, etc., is an avoidance of real life. In fact, I was avoiding my real life *before* Facebook. Being on Facebook made my hermitude impossible. There are possible things to criticise with Facebook, but the oldtimers are choosing all the wrong targets. Really, who cares about friends list competitions? Keeping up with the Joneses is also a facet of real life -- so either tune out and drop out, or opt in and deal with the real, but make up your mind! and the real can be very shallow, if you think about wrong, that's one of its defining attributes -- a few months dissing the new online generation for being shallow, and how quickly we forget that all Tom and Bill talk about is their souped up motor vehicles and snowmobiles, and that's all theyre ever going to talk about no matter where you meet them, and superficial people will be superficial in any context. Facebook isn't going to turn your friends into the most sophisticated and charming group of people on the planet. It just puts you in touch with who they are, how they are -- always. Any criticism that involves normal human foibles in the exercise of materialism is a criticism of any multiparty communication system, not just Facebook. Get used to it, oldtimers, and stop underestimating, or you'll turn your heads and suddenly the world will be converted into something you thought you could safely discount as a joke. Not that the world will log onto Facebook, specifically. But the world online will inevitably become more and more like Facebook, because the big secret that is out among the youth now is that Tim Berners-Lee got it backwards. The most important people that you want to maintain a 'web presence' for *isn't* composed of a random collection of bloggers, academics, kooks, and general internet strangers waiting to snipe at you anonymously. The people you want to maintain a presence for are primarily your friends. No, people who dis Facebook as an avoidance of real life, when it's the first website in history that actually aims to bring your real life to the web, are getting it spectacularly, head-slappingly wrong.
I hate to break it to you, but there have been people who have been able to get away with exactly the sort of academic strategy you describe since long before we had 'concentration' pills, so this 'unfair advantage' is nothing new. All students are not nor have they ever been created equal. Some people just learn some subjects way easier than other people do. If somebody is trying to pop some pill in order to get ahead, they are likely paying for that in some other way, so it changes exactly nothing about the balance of the world.
Would be to specify the patents you want to defeat. Why build a system an order of magnitude bigger than what it needs to be? If there are problem patents on the record, target those. Sure, it's a big job, but it ain't shit compared to tracking all ideas, everywhere, for all time, to solve a problem with a very specific set of ideas that have legal claims attached to them. After you have identified the enemy, find publications (foreign and otherwise, they all fit the requirements) that contain a prior description of a similar idea. (The one-click buy? For stuff like that, it should be easy.) And then start a public campaign for emailing and/or snailing copies of these descriptions en masse to the Patent Office. (Forget petitions. If you aren't inconveniencing anyone, don't even bother.)
Not really the point. Like I said, having the passenger in the car is almost certainly more dangerous than not having the passenger in the car. Yet we allow passengers in cars. Something being statistically more dangerous does not necessarily mean it should be outlawed. After all if you add enough people to an activity eventually a bunch of them are going to die from it. With a small population it might take 50 years for this to happen. With a large population it might happen several times a year. Aggregate enough data about eating apples and you will find that it kills. This is why yearly death figures are completely meaningless. Death figures are only useful when expressed as a percentage of participants, and that's the only way we should consider them, to avoid the absurd effect that the bigger our population is, the fewer rights anybody has to do anything fun, because of a statistical illusion. I think a society of a billion people deserves the same rights and freedoms as a society of 1000 people. Which means we MUST learn to tolerate multiple people per year dying from the sort of activity that only kills 1 person a decade in a smaller country. We MUST learn to see the two as MORALLY EQUIVALENT -- because they are.
Okay, what's the difference between talking on a handsfree cel and talking to the person in the passenger seat? Or do you think that drivers should wear muzzles? Or here's an idea -- outlaw passengers. Drivers without passengers would inevitably cause fewer accidents. My point: life is a risk that you must take in order live it. Reasonable responsibility like not busying your hands on other things while driving are common sense. Demanding that people not busy their mouths either is just getting incredibly anal about it and setting the bar for cel phones inexplicably higher than any other form of driving conversation.
A cogent response. It is a good point that lab rats aren't the same as humans, but notice that this doesn't prevent correlated effects from happening, nor does it prevent our scientists from gleaning valuable information from these correlations. In other words: scientists do experiment on lab rats! So clearly a non-identical testbed is no barrier to science -- never has been. Your point also in the first paragraph about time scales is less good. If we are so hard-pressed to keep our climate now with 6 billion-odd people, it goes without saying that 100 years from now we will be even more pressed. Or do you think that either (a) we will all be dead in a few hundred years or (b) we will have solved all our climate problems and will no longer be busy destablising our climate in countless ways both old and new. These extremes are the only logical conditions in which your 'time scales' rebuttal operates, because *all* of the in-between scenarios involve continuing homegrown climate challenges for us on an ongoing basis. Thus, 'it will take too long' is an irrelevant evaluation. Personally, I think the future is overwhelmingly likely to work out into one of those in-between scenarios. We ain't even close to done to nearly killing ourselves yet, but I doubt that we will be *completely* successful at it even if the worst disasters happen. Some of us will survive, probably with scientific knowledge. What do we do for next time, the next 'civilisation' -- just hope and pray that human nature will have changed? Give up now? I find your view to be pessimistic to the point of nihilism. Finally, you're right: it is naive to suggest that we can accurately forecast the effects of our actions. That is why we need to go in there and start taking actions and observing the resuls -- that is how you build an accurate forecast system. As for preserving Mars like a some kind of deserted 'National Park' -- sorry but I find this idea a bit laughable on several levels. There isn't even any life that will benefit from this range -- we're talking about rocks here. Do we have any designated 'National Parks' on Earth where there is no actual wilderness (i.e. noting alive and "wild")? Have we designated a particularly interestingly shaped Iceberg in Antarctica a national park? Mars is not a "wilderness". The only thing that I can think of that would be of value to anyone on Mars is the geological record of its history, along with any artefacts that could provide evidence that there may have been life on it at one time. There is no reason that terraforming needs to interfere with that kind of science. We aren't going to be taking a blender to the planet or anything. Terraforming is just changing the atmosphere and the soil content (and the soil content part only really has to apply to a small patch of the planet -- face it, we aren't going to be emigrating in the millions to Mars or anything, this is going to be a small colony for the entire course of the experiment). We could easily leave more than 90% of the planet in its original state, aside from the presence of an atmosphere. In fact, it would probably be prohibitively complex to conduct any experiment on a larger scale than that. The side benefits is that the geologists can go up with the terraformers and conduct the two surveys in tandem. These dudes are dying to go up there and actually dig for historical knowledge (rather than survival knowledge). Nobody's going to pay their freight for the sake of history -- but as passengers on a mission of vital importance to the future? This could happen. A mission to terraform is probably one of the best things that could happen to science and the human race.
You've got this completely backwards. We *should* be monkeying around with the *uninhabited* planet, not the inhabited one. (Unless you are suggesting that you think there might be life there *currently* -- pretty much the only thing that is almost universally agreed about Mars is that there isn't.) And even if we can't stop monkeying with the one we live on. Although it's probably doomed to fail, that's not the point. Even attempting to terraform Mars could teach us things (in a nonlethal environment since nobody lives there yet, thus there is nobody to "inflict" anything on) about our own planet that will end up saving all life of Earth. We need to start learning how to accurately terraform -- this much is obvious. The fact that any Mars ecosystem would likely be unsustainable due to lack of a magnetosphere and low gravity, etc. actually makes it a perfect place to start -- because we actually have no clue what we're doing in this area. We need to make our mistakes on a 'temporary' habitat -- if Mars will lose whatever we do to its 'atmosphere' and revert to its barren state over some hundreds or thousands of years, all the better -- it's an automatic reset switch. It means the system tends to return to its origin. That's perfect: we can try again later in a slightly or completely different manner. So, no ... you *don't* keep your hands off the scientifically perfect "test range planet" out of some misplaced sense of an ethical responsibility that is actually meaningless (responsibility to whom? the memory of native Martians who might have been?)
No, you use the test planet to learn about planet-wide effects in a casualty-free manner. Your argument is like saying to a scientist, 'I'm not really sure I want you to be inflicting your test vaccines on these innocent lab rats. At least not until we figure out how to fix the way it works in humans.'
If you want an actual *solution* to unwanted global climate change (other than: adapt!), we are going to have to start screwing around and experimenting with global climates. Seems to me like a no-brainer.
Terraform Mars. Planetwide intractable problems and all. Even if it turns out to be livable for only 25 years, the lessons learned will have been well worth the money and effort, and could end up saving not only the human race but every species on Earth.
There is really not much creative use to which you can put a bottle of ketchup (that would be fit for a G-rated audience), is there? Garbage In / Garbage Out. Oh, and one more tip for Heinz: if you are going to try to "harness" the power of audience enthusiasm, it helps not slag off the unprofessionalism of all your entries in public. Guess what just happened to all of the enthusiasm of everybody who read that insult? If you're going to truck with the mob, you have to find a way to appreciate the mob. And don't give them a lame-o assignment to start with.
Well, there's no accounting for taste. Take care, dude, from the "troll".
Well my comment is certainly about the steady unmitigated march of DRM in America, so it is certainly on-topic. Last I checked the definition of a troll was not 'anyone with an opinion about a problem who doesn't contribute to the solution'. Exceedingly narrow, that one. And yeah, I absolutely do revel in the impending collapse of your cultural *hegemony* (note I didn't say the collapse of your actual culture) -- perhaps you don't realise just how oppressive that hegemony can be? It's very difficult to get the attention of your own countrymen when they have been advertised into oblivion by the American entertainment machine. The Great Suicide of DRM works in everybody else's favour on two fronts: it associates American entertainment with draconian restrictions, which is a serious image problem; and it actually hampers and chills the free exchange of ideas when one of those ideas originates in your litigious land -- heck it even chills the free exchange when BOTH ideas originate in the USA. Attenuation of the evolutonary field: it will inevitably take its toll. And the great part of it is, America is doing it to itself as a result of exactly the same materialism that empties its main cultural exports of any consequence. Poetic justice, well deserved. Definitely worth a few chuckles and cheers, and a party. Questions: Do Buddhists believe in a sense of humour? What about irony? Any zen in that? This has been a long time coming.
To sum up the parent post: terrorists and other recent immigrants, wannabe actors, and internet users who aren't even morally righteous enough to at least live in the US, are stealing the precious financial fluids of the American people, and the solution is to replace all the pin numbers that these fine upstanding Americans have stored in their heads with a verification device that is stored in their pockets, so that it ... won't be so easy to ... sorry, can't type -- laughing ...
You may disagree with my opinion, but I assure you that I am dead serious about it. Is everybody who doesn't like your culture a troll? If you must know I find it for the most part empty and insanely materialistic, and I would be surprised if you don't feel exactly the same way. BTW the periodic reinvention *is* a good thing, but it's obviously taking a turn for the worse, because your entertainment industry is now reinventing itself as the Death Star.
And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering? Actually, by that measure, these 6-bit LCDs might get a pass, since they dither through time not space. In other words, a single individual pixel can be responsible for both colours involved in the dither (by just flashing rapidly through two states). Thus that individual IS displaying a colour not strictly contained in the 6-bit colour space. I would say this is a grey area. But I do think the advertising on these LCDs led people to mistakenly equate this "flashing 18-bit pixel" with a "static 24-bit pixel", so I am in support of the lawsuit but only if it is widened to encompass the entire laptop industry. Bullshit advertising is, actually, bullshit. Who can say otherwise? Let there be consequences.
The parent post should definitely NOT be scored as informative. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between colour as it is displayed on a computer monitor and colour as it is stored in the host file. Unless Adobe and others just spontaneously decided to cripple their file formats, all of the things mentioned above about the impact of LCD characteristics on the manipulability of digital photos are complete nonsense.
I can't stop laughing and cheering as I continue to watch American culture self-implode under the weight of its own arrogance and greed. Almost every decade, American has reinvented itself in a major way (the '70s, the '80s, and the '90s all had their own movements that cut across film, music, television, and even the slower-moving world of books). This decade I've been waiting for the 'Big New American Thing' and here it is, it's DRM. Watching the slow suffocation that comes from not realising that you owe your audience everything and they actually owe you nothing. I want this. I celebrate it. I've been hoping it accelerates and my hopes just always seem to be one-upped by reality. Sayonara people! The era of American cultural hegemony is coming to a close, and I'm havin' a party!